jobyssey/docs/hanover-park/shared-ground.mdx

---
title: Shared ground
description: Where Nick's path and mine overlap, and how to use each overlap in the room without turning it into a comparison.
sidebar:
  icon: users
---

The rapport plan. Every row is something both of us have lived through, with the honest version of my side and the angle that turns it into a conversation rather than a pitch.

:::tip[The rule]
Peer, not applicant. He raised 1.3M, I raised 4.7M; he got into YC, I did not. Neither number is the point. Trade on the shared experience, and never lead with the comparison.
:::

## Side by side

| | Nick | Me |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Degree | Columbia CS, 2019 | VCU Applied Math, 2020 |
| First real job | Amazon, then Oscar Health in hypergrowth | Leidos, CBP Mobile Passport (federal, regulated) |
| Founder solves own problem | Retail-investor tooling from Pronk's Discord audience | Wallet hacked, 15k lost, built a seedphrase-less wallet |
| Y Combinator | W22 with Stock Unlock, 500k from YC | Interviewed for the pre-incorporation Sonr prototype (2020/21), not accepted |
| Founding structure | Co-founder/CTO twice (Jake Ruth and Daniel Pronk; Chris Hladczuk) | Solo founder, CEO and de facto CTO for five years |
| Team | Small team, 3 co-founders at Stock Unlock; ~20 engineers now | 7 FTE plus two agencies; 20+ engineers at peak, all reporting to me |
| Money movement | General ledger, waterfall engine, zero-fee payments | USDC settlement, MPC custody, passkey wallets, on-chain fee handling |
| Migration under correctness constraints | Asylum Ventures: 30+ entities, a decade of books, ~100 hours | Cosmos L1 to Base L2 migration of live state; 120+ developers onboarded |
| Infra posture | Serverless by default (Lambda/Dynamo, then Supabase/Trigger.dev) | Both: Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects, AWS Lambda, and Kubernetes validator ops at 99% uptime |
| Leaving a company | Exited Stock Unlock June 2023; company continued under Jake | Sunsetting Sonr now, investors informed, wrap-up in weeks |
| Public surface | Almost none; Chris is the voice | Fast Company byline, MIT Sloan guest lecture, top-5 global GitHub contributions in 2021/22 |

## Y Combinator

**His side.** Stock Unlock was W22. YC put in 500k of a ~1.3M seed. The product launched December 2021 off a four-month beta, so YC overlapped with the first months post-launch. He left 18 months after Demo Day.

**My side, said plainly.** "We interviewed with YC on the file-sharing prototype before Sonr was incorporated. Didn't get in. Raised 4.7M anyway from Torch, SHMA, Bag Capital, and Builder." Do not soften it and do not dwell on it. The interview-but-no-invite is a normal founder story and he will have friends with the same one.

**Why it transfers.** He has seen the inside of the batch; I have seen the outside. Ask what YC actually changed for a subscription consumer product, whether the Demo Day forcing function helped or hurt, and whether any of it carried into Hanover Park's raise. Hanover Park is not listed as a YC company in the notes; the ~40% ex-founder engineering team includes ex-YC founders. Ask rather than assume.

## Cofounding versus solo

**His side.** Twice a CTO with a business-side co-founder who owns the outside: Jake and Daniel at Stock Unlock, Chris at Hanover Park. He has never been the public face and appears to prefer it.

**My side.** Solo for five years: fundraising, customer discovery, team direction, and architecture all on one desk. The honest lesson from Dave's screen: I want a seat at the engineering table, not the fundraising one.

**Why it transfers.** He chose his structure; I am choosing mine now. The interesting question is how he and Chris split decisions in an org with no PMs, and what a founder-turned-IC gets right and wrong in their first six months on his team. Forty percent of his engineers have made that exact transition.

## Leaving well

**His side.** Left Stock Unlock in June 2023 with the company still operating. Whatever the reason, he handed off a live product with paying subscribers.

**My side.** Sonr wind-down: investors informed last month, landing page plus ops cleanup, two to three weeks. Sunsetting on good terms; never found product-market fit.

**Why it transfers.** Both are stories about the end of a company told without bitterness. If it comes up, one sentence each and move on. The framing that landed with Dave: "not that I didn't want to stop, it was at the point where I had to move on."

## Money that must be right

**His side.** Double-entry ledger, waterfall engine, capital calls and distributions for multi-billion-dollar funds; one hallucinated journal entry can cost a 1B client.

**My side.** Irreversible on-chain operations, USDC settlement, MPC key shares where a bug loses funds permanently, a wallet-generation incident fixed the same week (40 seconds down to ~400ms by ripping out protobufs).

**Why it transfers.** Same shape of problem: adversarial or irreversible money movement, idempotency, audit trails, reconciliation. This is the strongest bridge from my background into the system design, and the ground for the ledger questions.

## Serverless pragmatism, with one difference

**His side.** Lambda plus Dynamo plus Cognito at Stock Unlock; Supabase plus Trigger.dev plus SST now. Managed primitives, small team, ship fast.

**My side.** Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects for the Motr enclave, Lambda at Unissant, and the part he has not done: running four geographically distributed validator nodes on Kubernetes with KMS-secured keys.

**Why it transfers.** I can agree with the default and speak credibly to the exit ramp. In the design, pick managed primitives, then name the specific point where Supabase or Trigger.dev stops scaling and what replaces it. Do not propose Kubernetes up front.

## Builder who lets the product speak

**His side.** No talks, no blog, empty GitHub, avoids cameras. Forbes 30 Under 30 is the only self-promotion on record.

**My side.** The opposite public record, but the thing I am proudest of is the same kind of thing: a 700-commit chain repo and a sole-author crypto library, not the byline.

**Why it transfers.** Compliment the ledger and the Asylum migration by name, not the press. Do not mention my GitHub ranking unless asked.

## What not to do

- No comparison of raise sizes, batch status, or press.
- No "I could have done YC" framing; the honest version is shorter and better.
- No lecturing on blockchain; translate every Sonr example into ledger, settlement, or custody terms.
- No softballs about culture. The questions page has the real ones.